It all started in February 1953, when Henri Filipacchi, who was secretary-general of Librairie Hachette at the time, came up with the idea to create a collection of affordable paperbacks.
He applied to literature the printing and distribution techniques employed by popular novels, and involved his publisher friends – Albin Michel, Calmann-Lévy, Grasset and Gallimard – in the endeavour. The first Le Livre de Poche paperbacks were the novels Kœnigsmark by Pierre Benoit, The Keys of the Kingdom by A. J. Cronin and Vol de nuit by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. They cost 2 francs each – only slightly more than a newspaper.
The collection quickly became a stunning success: detective novels, cookbooks and home improvement books soon joined classic and contemporary literature among its titles. In the late 1950s, a new generation of readers warmly embraced Le Livre de Poche for generalizing and democratizing reading. Swann in Love by Marcel Proust rapidly won over 500,000 readers.
Le Livre de Poche paperbacks became such a touchstone in the lives of French people that in the 1960s they were included in the consumer price index basket.
Since it was founded, Le Livre de Poche has published over 25,000 titles for a total of 1.2 billion copies distributed. Despite the many competitors inspired by its success, Le Livre de Poche is still number one in the adult paperback market in France (source: GFK).
Now published by Librairie Générale Française, Le Livre de Poche works with 70 partner publishers to bring out about 400 new titles each year. Its catalogue is distributed in almost every country on earth.
Le Livre de Poche is a borderless collection open to all audiences: Amélie Nothomb, Guillaume Musso and Gaël Faye rub shoulders with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Descartes.